Gentrification takes Imagination

Let’s talk about moral philosophy!

During my too many years of post high school education I got to know several philosophers as well as I could bear, and in all that time never met a moral philosopher. So it strikes me as a relatively unexplored field. That attracts me. It’s fun to shine light into previously unseen dark nooks of the world.

What I especially don’t see in what passes for moral philosophy is the flip side of moralizing: they’ll devote pages and pages telling me what I MUST or MUST NOT do, but never offer any ideas about making morality fun. What kind of philosophy is it that won’t tell you how to have a good time?

An unimaginative philosophy, that’s what. It’s an ingredient missing in most accounts of moral philosophy: they account for human failings, but not for human potential. You’d think that imagination plays no role at all in real world moral considerations, when it’s actually everything.

In fact some of the most interesting real world squabbles arise from conflicting imaginings of potential good. An interesting case has arisen in NYC’s East Village. For some time a Mr. Gregg Singer, a real estate developer, has wanted to replace an old East Village public school with a 19-story college dormitory. But locals have resisted, and now P.S. 64 has been declared a historical landmark.

That made Mr. Singer mad. While he sued the city to get the ruling overturned, he announced he would meanwhile use a previously obtained permit to strip the building of its ornamentation and promised to start up a new homeless service on the premises. He created a website showcasing the homeless agency he would start, naming it the “Christotora Treatment Corporation.” The name imitates the name of the Christodora Condominiums, where some of his local opponents live.

Gregg Singer claimed to have been inspired by the knowledge that the condominiums had long ago been a settlement house, established to serve the poor, and by the fact that his own Great Grandfather Louis Singer had once established a shelter for the elderly. But he has made it clear that his intent is to get East Village residents to side with his original plans by exploiting their NIMBY fears of the homeless. As he says of the battered woman who graces the front page of his website, “Yeah – she’s a bum.”

What we have here is imagination at work in unfolding history.

Settlement houses were themselves a work of moral imagination. The idea was that people who were so rich they had nothing but free time could move into poor neighborhoods and set up services for the poor neighbors.

Gentrification is an imaginative evil spawn of the idea of settlement houses. Once you can get rich people to come in to a neighborhood to help the poor, you can get more rich people to move in next to the first rich people, to displace the poor. Pretty soon no poor, not in that neighborhood anyway. Imagine that! People do imagine it, and many go on to the idea that they’re entitled to gentrification, entitled to live without any trace of poverty around them, and NIMBYism is born.

Then comes Gregg Singer imagining NIMBYism forward, turning it into a weapon. His idea for Christotora also springs from knowing one way to make morality profitable, if not fun: there’s money in selling shelter spaces to large non-profit corporations. Not as much as the money you can get from selling dorm spaces to non-profit universities, but it will do as an alternative. Hey, anyway, if you get enough money you can buy the fun, right?

Only the imagining doesn’t stop there. This is the East Village we’re talking about, not Boring Heights. They LIKE the shelter plans; they can see a great future in it. The residents of the condo are even lining up to volunteer at the promised shelter! What book on moral philosophy could have prepared you for that outcome?

Step Up to the Hate

“Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a humor column about hate crimes out of my hat!” “That’s not a humor column, Bullwinkle!”

OK, hate crimes aren’t remotely funny. I think that’s a given. But hate can be amusing. For example, I have come to realize over the years that my hatred for Steven G., who was my next-door neighbor when I was 11, has assumed comic proportions. That’s because, in the 45 years since he got two buddies to hold me down so he could punch me in the face without getting punched back, Steven G. has become my personal metaphor for all that is evil in the world. While others denounce Satan, I denounce Steven G.

Some days I spend hours thinking up delicious revenges upon Steven G. I imagine Steven G. coming to my building to see me, to ask if I could come out to play, just like he always used to do. And I would say no just like I always did, because even before the punching incident I hated him, because all he wanted me to do was come outside and worship him, and be dazzled by the cool way he dressed, and be awed by how many girls he promised he would have in the coming years, once he had managed to have any; that was his idea of “playing,” and I despise being that bored.

So in my fantasies I would say no, but Steven G. wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, just like every day 45 years ago. But, unlike 45 years ago, this time I would get all Quentin Tarantino on his ass. Oh, yes, I’d come out to play all right. “Bring it on, Stevie G., I’m coming out to play! Look, Stevie G., I have a pound of peeled garlic, a vice, a couple of crowbars, and a tube of Super Glue! Guess what game were going to play!”

My point is that hate can be amusing because it’s just an emotion. It’s not whether you hate; it’s whether and how you act on it. Since I haven’t yet really stuffed a pound of peeled garlic up Steven G.’s nostrils, or done the other things with the vice, etc., thinking about it can still be entertaining.

Here’s a purely rhetorical question: If hate crimes are bad because they involve hate, does that mean that stalking, a “love crime,” is good?

Seriously, no, it doesn’t. But the question might help explain why the general public is confused about the issue. People are constantly writing to tell editors of newspapers, “We don’t need hate crime legislation; all violent crimes are hate crimes, therefore all violent crimes should be treated the same.”

Here’s the difference: if I Super Glue Steven G.’s face to the front of his tight, purple, package-revealing, hip-huggers, I will have committed an act of violence against one Steven G., but I will not have terrorized all Steven G.s everywhere in the process.

If I had my way, advocates for hate crime legislation would stop using the term “hate crime” and start talking about terrorism. The reason the crimes call for more severe penalties is that they are acts of terrorism against groups. The immediate victim is intended to represent the rest of the group and the crime meant to terrorize the whole group.

Until I get my way, It would really help the debate if opponents of hate crime legislation would stop attacking the misnomer, and deal with the real purpose of the proposed laws. “Why make hate a crime?” makes as much sense as “Why do we have anti-trust laws? Isn’t trusting good?”

Here’s an unfunny factoid: Right now, in this country, homeless people are being murdered, for being homeless, at a rate (per their total numbers, per year) comparable to the rate at which Blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968. America commits its pogroms on a personal scale, one at a time, up close.

Magic, Mushroomed

As many of you know, I am not currently homeless. I am in a 52-unit DESC building very similar to the one DESC, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, is proposing to create in Rainier Valley, and it really ticks me off to hear that some residents out there think people like me wouldn’t make good enough neighbors. So I bet you think that I, director of Rant Central, will write about that.

Ha! Fooled you. No, I chose to take my blood pressure meds early this morning, and focus my thoughts on sweet things like baby bunnies, adult bunnies, pretty flowers, and dead Eyman-initiatives. And with my thoughts so cleansed and cheerified I chose to use the remainder of my space to cherish the magic.

I was inspired to do this when DESC workers delivered a brand new “Magic Chef” refrigerator to the woman that drew me to my housing, Anitra “Co-Conspirator” Freeman, and she said, “What’s magic about it? It’s not even energy-efficient! Doesn’t DESC know they’re wasting power and money by buying cheap energy-inefficient refrigerators?”

Poor, poor, jaded Anitra does not see the magic! Here she has a box that sucks invisible stuff out of the wall and turns it into coldness! You don’t have to feed it ice to keep the inside cold! In fact if you give it water it will turn it, magically, into ice!

There is so much magic in our lives. Our running water for example. We have a cold stream and a hot stream in our apartments! Right inside our apartments! Next to our toilets!

Thinking about these things made the weird neurons in my head (the ones in the back) zap my amygdala, or so it felt. I was motivated to ask, “What’s the most magical thing ever in all of our lives?”

The answer I gave myself was, “Volition.” I didn’t have to give myself that answer; I did it anyway, because I WANTED to. Isn’t that amazing?

People can make choices, then tell themselves -- tell their own dumb bodies -- to do what they decide, and their dumb bodies do it! Like magic! It goes on all the time every day, week after week, year after year!

I’ll give some examples. I’ll give you a second to contemplate baby bunnies before reading them.

Right. Lt. Ehren Watada became a Lieutenant of his own free will, by enlisting in the Army in 2003, by some accounts AFTER the Iraq War started. Now by his own free will he is ready to go to prison for refusing to join in that war. And he probably WILL go to prison! Volition: magic!

Here’s another example: The United States Senate consented overwhelmingly (89-2) to the UN Charter in the summer of 1945, making the UN Charter a part of US law. Since then there has been only sporadic and relatively insignificant popular protest of that action. So it can safely be said that the vast majority of the current populace of the US either agrees that the UN Charter should be US law, or is too apathetic to give a damn one way or another. Volition: magic!

Of course, that means that it is “our” choice, the freely-willed choice of this vast majority, that preemptive wars be illegal. Our government signed it in 1945, and we have since, as a people, freely consented to it! We’re enlisted! When does the warmaker go to prison? Volition: magic!

One more example. Pharmacists on the Washington State Pharmacy Board want to give pharmacists in the state the power to refuse lawfully prescribed medicines, when they feel like it, one at a time, just by referring patients to another pharmacist, who could also refer them to another, and another -- effectively depriving the patients of THEIR power to make the moral choice themselves, and violating the principle, “my body, my choice, you bastards.”

Yo, Pharmacists, you enlisted! If you don’t like the duty, you can will yourselves to resign. Volition: magic!

It's on the Tip of My Tongue...

What should we call our new form of government?

This can’t be a Republic any more. I’d say the Republic died November 4, 1952, when Truman let the National Security Agency start up without the knowledge of the citizens or most of Congress, but that’s just me.

Some other folks say the Republic ended the first time Congress neglected to either declare or put a stop to a war. Others blame Congress for a hundred years of dragging its heels on civil rights legislature forcing the people to fall back on the courts. Unexpected results: (1) George Bush, 5-4, 2000. (2) The Eminent Domain Principle neutered, 5-4, 2005. (3) The obliteration of First Amendment rights enabling public employees to protect the public, 5-4, last week.

Need more proof? Our executive branch now conducts searches without warrants and regularly tries to deny habeas corpus. Our elected president abuses signing statements to excuse the selective enforcement of laws, openly defying the power of Congress to make those laws.

It’s now deemed illegal to exercise the right of free speech except in a “free speech zone.” Military funerals have been nationally designated, now and forever, as free from free speech. Cries of “Protestor!” from security at the president’s appearances are signals to use violent force to remove and arrest such people as wear anti-Bush T-shirts, who are treated as enemies of the state.

Many have already been asking the question I began with, and come up with ideas of their own. Some say we should imitate Rome and call our government Empire. I think that the Romans were not precise enough; yes, it was an empire, but it was so much more. Let’s be precise where the Romans weren’t, because we care more about who we are.

Some say we now have a Fascist government. They point first to Mussolini’s definition: the repudiation of pacifism, the glorification of war, the claim to nevertheless be pro-life, the rejection of class struggle and explicit rejection of collective responsibility, the idea that citizens need to be preemptively deprived of freedoms that might only potentially be “harmful,” and the right of the state to assert itself in the world, by virtue of its power.

If all that doesn’t get you to buy the name, proponents point to Dr. Lawrence Britt’s Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism, all of which apply to our government, from (1) “Powerful and Continuing Nationalism,” (2) “Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights,” all the way through to (13) “Rampant Cronyism and Corruption” and even (14) “Fraudulent Elections.” (Note the universal use by both parties of gerrymandering to lock incumbents into office -- a war on the representational system.)

I don’t think we should call our government Fascist, even if it fit everyone’s definition, because Fascism comes from the Italian Fascismo, and by golly, we speak American here. So we should have our own American name for our form of government.

“Totalitarianism” is technically valid, but like “Empire” hardly descriptive enough, and our leadership is not so narrow as the kind of one party dictatorship the term usually conjures up. George-Dick Bush-Cheney is not solely in control. He/it has to share power with Judge Roberts, Exxon, Halliburton and even some Democrats, like Zell Miller, for example.

So we would need to refer to what we have as some kind of oligarchy, but what kind is it?

For a clue I looked up the origin of the word “Republic.” It comes from the Latin res (meaning “thing” or “matter”) + public (meaning “public.”) So it means a Public Thing. Clearly, what we’ve got now is no kind of Public Thing. What we’ve got is a secret, private thing. We have a government of dissembling and disguise.

So my own recommendation is (tada!): Redissimulation.

Here it is, used in a sentence:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to The Redissimulation for which it stands, one oligarchy under Bush’s imaginary God, entrenched and unaccountable, with liberty and justice, but not for long.

Save Me From The Savior Wannabes

My original idea for this column was to report to you from the 93rd Annual Convention of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions in the manner of Hunter S Thompson.

Since we are not, in fact, the Duke, it would never occur to me or to Anitra “Mistress Gonzo” Freeman (I’m not prejudiced against Christians, I live with one!) to wade into Grand Ballroom 2 at the SeaTac Doubletree Inn among up to 1000 missionaries without prior consent. Our Editorial Manager Adam Hyla called ahead. He got a nice PR woman, who said something like, oh yes, we know about Real Change, and I read that column by Wes Browning on us a few weeks back, and ha, ha, he sure doesn’t like Christians does he? And then we got permission anyway; so I thought, time to pack our drugs.

But then I thought, Good God, is even their press agent 90% satire-impaired? The column mentioned was NOT anti-Christian. All I did was satirize the AGRM’s website. I wanted to show how their own talk about homeless people might feel to the homeless people themselves by turning it around and applying the same language to missions. If the missionaries were offended by it, they were supposed to understand that they themselves had provided the template.

Clearly, these people need training wheels on their satire. Setting an impression of Hunter S Thompson before them without any exegesis would be like renting your 12 year-old nephew an expensive hooker and not telling him which end is up. It just results in waste. I was going to have to explain in excruciating detail that I don’t actually pop pills or do hookers or drink until noon-o-clock in the morning.

Then the day came, and we were in the ballroom. The head honcho at the dais was saying how great it was that George Bush had appeared on closed circuit TV earler to say a few words to the gathering . Ah heck, we thought, we missed it because we were too busy scoring acid. NO WE WEREN’T, we were across the street downing Sourdough Jacks and jalapeño poppers, because we couldn’t afford $32 for the conference meal.

The best part of the evening was the Total Experience Gospel Choir. Too bad there were too many missionaries in the way, or we could have danced until we ripped a hole in the floor.

Speaking of ripping holes, it was time then for Dr. Kenneth “Hutch” Hutcherson to talk. This was what we really came for. What would the famous Hutch want to say to the AGRM, besides that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, etc? Surely he would have a special message. We were right! He came to talk about ripping holes!

Specifically, he discussed Mark Chapter 2, wherein Jesus heals a paralytic that had been lowered through a hole in the ceiling. From this he arrived at the idea that when people come to missions for shelter and food (which he calls “coming for the wrong reasons” as if the missions don’t deliberately set that bait!) it is up to the missions to “rip parts of their lives out of them” (like the hole in the roof, get it?) to reach hollows in their hearts to shove Jesus into! You couldn’t ask for a less disingenuous description of what I referred to previously as the spiritual violence of proselytism. Hutch is for it! Treat the existing spirituality of the homeless people who come to you like so much roofing! And the audience cheered!

Here’s the satire part, for the missionaries reading this: My final recommendation to the rest of the world is we all do to you what Hutch says do to homeless people. We lure you into coming to us for the wrong reasons, by letting you believe we care what you think about gay marriage. Then without your permission we rip your bad-ass violent hearts a new one, and shove tolerance into the hole.

Mahalo.

We Followed Our Bliss

Why do we need myths at all?

My first position on the creation of life, the universe, and everything, is that demanding that God tell you the answer is sheer blasphemy. You don’t ask your parents to tell you how your conception went. “Was there a condom and did it break?” “Was a threesome involved?” “Was it good for everyone?” “Was it videotaped?” “Can I watch it?” These are questions you do NOT ask.

My second position on creation, etc., is that, if any crimes were actually committed by any of the principals involved, surely the statutes of limitations have all expired by now. So there can hardly be grounds for prosecution. Although, look up the “Problem of Evil” for a view that indicates civil action, perhaps including class reparations, might still be appropriate.

So why are so many making so much noise about all these ideas, when they have nothing to do with things that matter in our everyday lives, like the price of gasoline, the rising costs of housing, government invasions of privacy, racism, the dismantling of the biosphere, or will Katie Couric dominate prime time broadcast news?

I think the answer to the question I just asked is that I was full of it when I asked it. I think that creation myths have everything to do with homelessness, invasions by Alberto Gonzalez, Katie Couric, etc.

For example:

Scientists studying mass quantities of human and chimp cheek swabs, have set forth a rich new theory, namely that ages ago common ancestors of chimps and humans (I’ll call them chumpans) split into isolated populations which evolved separately into distinct varieties, I’ll call them chimpans and chumans. BUT, these then came back together and got the hots for each other, and they went for it, and lo, verily they did have offspring such as chimans, chullimpas, chichichumans, and chuchums.

And then, THOSE did also come to know one another, and bunches of offsprings maybe beat each other, and other bunches wasted their lives getting high on fermented berries, and others simply sucked at termite hunting and starved to death, and finally, only “chimps” and “humans” were left, and those no longer had sex together, right? Because it had no procreative purpose now, wink, wink, as they were by then different species. Praise Darwin.

This is a fine subcreation theory every bit as fun as that Garden, Serpent and “Apple” business is when you figure out what the snake is really doing there. You can tell your kids, “Yes, children, scientists have determined that the entire species of Homo Sapiens has original sin. In fact we once were ALL trailer trash. Our ancestors didn’t just mess around one Sunday afternoon in a public park. They were messing around for millions of years with ALL the apes in the neighborhood of a continent, in every park, street, and alley, whether the apes bathed, or not, or shaved their foreheads.”

In fact you could say this theory suggests that we humans owe our evolution of big brains and our domination of the planet to our long prehistory of sleeping with relatives. We evolved BECAUSE we were all Jerry Springer fodder, for eons.

But I digress. I was going to say that these ideas are NOT irrelevant to important questions of public policy, like starvation, Darfur, immigration, the exploration of space, Key Arena, what part of the horse Tim Eyman is, gay marriage, homelessness, WASL, Putin’s opinion of Cheney, or Katie Couric.

It’s true. When we all can agree on where we all came from it will be like the good old days when everyone always watched the Ed Sullivan Show and could answer questions about it the next day. Or like that time a couple years ago when we all saw the Paris Hilton clip.

When that day comes we will cease to be homeless people and non-homeless people. We will all be hairless apes whose ancestors once had sex with hairy apes, and the world will be as one.

Get Ready For Camp!

Why does the government really want our phone records? Let’s get conspiracy-theoretic all over this!

Here’s a clue. All the fury surrounding NSA’s data mining last week pushed another important story off the front pages. Kellogg Brown and Root, notorious subsidiary of Halliburton, was awarded a $385 million no-bid contingency contract to build a “network” of detention centers, here at home, in the future, for “some kind of mass migrations” or “the rapid development of new programs.” Each center would house up to 5000 detainees.

Allow me to restate that. KBR got handed $385 million in advance, without public debate, for the creation of a lots of new prison camps for people within the US, to all be built in a hurry, and we aren’t being told clearly why, or why KBR has to do it instead of the lowest bidder.

My main question, though, is how do you quickly create a “network” of prisons, each holding up to 5000, for a measly $385 million, assuming “network” means more than, like, 3 or 4?

Answer: You don’t create the prisons from scratch; you establish them where there are already sufficient facilities.

Wait, there’s a shortage of housing, right? Yes, in the civilian sector, but there is and long has been a glut of unused military housing in this country. What with the switch to an all-volunteer army and two overseas wars, there’s no shortage of barracks in the US. In fact the DoD has more bases than it needs.

OK, don’t believe that. Believe this: a big long unclassified document on the US Army’s official website that has been around for over a year, gathering almost no attention, details plans for something entitled the Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This CILP calls for the creation, FROM EXISTING UNUSED FACILITIES ON MILITARY BASES, of prison camps to exploit the labor of certain classes of federal prisoners. The plan specifically rules out paying the prisoners for the labor, so in human language, we’re talking SLAVE LABOR CAMPS. As they put it at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei – nicht!

How much do you think it might cost to set those camps up? I’d guess around $385 million or so.

According to the web document, some classes of federal prisoners would be “ineligible” for slavery within the Civilian Labor Program. For instance, sex offenders and drug dealers will not be so fortunate. Who remaining would be eligible?

How about people who wind up in federal custody because of disturbances arising from some kinds of mass migrations or the occasional rapidly developing program?

Gee, what with most of the National Guard off making Iraq free for oil exploitation, if we had even a risk of mass disturbances inside the US, we might have to declare martial law and round up and arrest all the potential troublemakers before the disturbances happen. What if there were a bird flu epidemic, making mass ineffectual quarantines look desirable? What if we tried to send the Mexicans home, and they wouldn’t go? What if a Democrat had a clear shot at the White House, for a change?

But how can we round up potential troublemakers if we don’t know who they are?

Well, thanks to the NSA, now we can know. We can start with our previously obtained list of known troublemakers, like the Raging Grannies, members of the ACLU, Real Change staff, non-Saudi-royal Muslims, Democratic Party precinct leaders, Simon Cowell, and such. Combine that with the NSA’s call data. Do a little easy network computation, and we can rate every resident of the country on a scale of zero to 10. Zero would mean you’re Bush, Cheney, or Rove or close family. Anything over 7.5, say, could mean the Bush administration wouldn’t miss you.

If you’re the average Real Change reader, you’ll probably be assigned an 8 or higher. Since you all won’t be able to vote from your slave labor camps you might as well hale Jeb as your next Überbush right now and get it over with.